Richard Rumelt
Strategy scholar and author of Good Strategy/Bad Strategy (2011) and The Crux (2022); taught for over four decades at UCLA's Anderson School of Management, earlier an engineer at JPL.
Richard Rumelt did not write this page.
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developer toolssemiconductorseducation
Their wordsSo what does Nvidia have that is so special? It has CUDA, the language that most AI runs on. CUDA has two decades of software libraries and developer tools. Graduate schools teach it. It has kernel-level optimizations so that Nvidia’s GPU is the thing you use to test out your new idea at 6 p.m. The Nvidia chip is the castle inside the CUDA moat.
↗Chokepoints and Moatsrumelt.substack.com 1st of 2 in this piece
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Their wordsGoogle’s open-source moves aim to drain that moat. If Nvidia’s strength comes from having a familiar software stack, then releasing an open-source stack that will work on TPUs lowers the switching costs for developers. Yes, the battle over hardware is important. But the real chokepoint being fought over is the developer stacks.
↗Chokepoints and Moatsrumelt.substack.com 2nd of 2 in this piece
- 3 months earlier
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Their wordsA serious strategy does not begin with a financial target or a vision statement. It begins with a clear-headed diagnosis. It requires identifying the crux of the challenge—the elephant in the elevator that everyone else is trying to ignore.
↗The Architecture of Disruptionrumelt.substack.com 1st of 2 in this piece
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Our reading
Good strategy is at least as much about what an organization does not do as about what it does.
Their wordsGood strategy is at least as much about what an organization does not do as it is about what it does.
↗The Architecture of Disruptionrumelt.substack.com 2nd of 2 in this piece
- 6 weeks earlier
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Their wordsPhyllis’s working specification was a deliberate resolution of ambiguity into an actionable description. It was the bridge from “we don’t know” to “we are building.” Her specification passed on to the engineers a simpler problem—not one that was easy, but one that was solvable. With that assumption in place, design work could begin.
- 3 months earlier
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Their wordsThe format is consistent: confident tone, macro warnings, precise predictions, specific allocations. The production quality is high. The emotional trigger is fear or FOMO. The sophisticated investor was never the target. The marginal viewer was.